Tag Archives: procurement strategy

Chris Sawchuk states that procurement needs to make agility core to all of its activities in order to survive.

At the Big Ideas Summit 2016, we challenged our thought leaders to share their Big Ideas for the future of procurement.

From ideas that have the potential to change the very nature of the procurement profession, to ones that got the assembled minds thinking about the profession’s impact outside of the organisation, the response we received was amazing.

Agility Core to Success

Chris Sawchuk, Principal and Global Procurement Advisory Practice Leader at The Hackett Group, says that procurement needs to make agility core in all of its activities.

With new events, such as disruptive innovation, happening all the time, and new organisations being created, existing organisations need to be more agile in order to cope with these challenges.

It is not about Direct vs. Indirect. It is also not about what is more critical and strategic between Direct and Indirect.

Things are more complex than a Manichean division of Procurement into two categories. If category management was just about that split, we would know it. Wouldn’t we?

This post is simply about common sense!

Serving Different Markets

All the above does not conflict with saying that there are specificities to both components of the Purchase spend. Especially when looking at industrial companies.

One area of differentiation between Direct and Indirect Procurement is related to the market they serve.

Indirect serves mostly internal needs, a.k.a. the employee

Direct serves external needs, a.k.a. the customer or the consumer. Though, of course, the difference between B2B and B2C is becoming increasingly blurred.

Both markets have their own challenges.

In indirect, the diversity of internal customers is quite important (travel is an example) and that makes stakeholder management quite difficult.

In Direct, stakeholders are more easily identifiable as they revolve around the product (this would typically be R&D and manufacturing). But consumers are more diverse and volatile, which requires special attention as, in the words of Peter Drucker, “the purpose of business is to create and keep a customer”.

Product Lifecycle

Another difference is the relationship to the product lifecycle.

R&D and New Product Development (NPD) are intrinsic to Direct Procurement. This is a bit less of a reality in Indirect, even if some indirect parts of the spend are related to complex projects very similar to NPD, for example, real estate and facility management.

Some companies like Apple have very complex projects to manage in that area, for example their new headquarters or their retail spaces. As retail spaces contribute to the overall customer experience, is that Direct Procurement or Indirect Procurement?

Supply chain management and execution is also an area of differentiation, as direct supply chains tend to be more global and complex.

Right Tool for the Right Job

This post is about using the right tool for the right job!

Each area has specificities, so you have to use specific tools and processes for the job. In terms of Direct Materials Procurement, some of the specificities translate into specific capabilities that modern platforms should have, as Michael Lamoureux from Sourcing Innovation explained in a recent post.

The thing is that none of the Indirect tools have all these capabilities. And neither they should, as most of them are irrelevant for a great part of indirect spend. As Lamoureux puts it in the conclusion of his white paper available for download here.

“The fact of the matter is that you wouldn’t use a Chihuahua to herd sheep, so why are you trying to use a mouse to herd cats (which is mission improbable anyway)?”

Dirk Van De Putte argues that procurement should embrace its role as a change catalyst in organisations, helping to break down organisational silos.

At the Big Ideas Summit 2016, we challenged our thought leaders to share their Big Ideas for the future of procurement.

From ideas that have the potential to change the very nature of the procurement profession, to ones that got the assembled minds thinking about the profession’s impact outside of the organisation, the response we received was amazing.

Procurement – A Change Catalyst

Global CPO, Dirk Van De Putte’s Big Idea discussed how procurement could act as a catalyst for change in organisations, due to its unique position at the crossroads of internal and external stakeholders.

Dirk gave his thoughts on how to successfully achieve this, with procurement breaking down organisational silos, as well as building a diverse function.

Alex Kleiner says that procurement organisations need to throw off their linear thinking to increase flexibility and collaboration.

At the Big Ideas Summit 2016, we challenged our thought leaders to share their Big Ideas for the future of procurement.

From ideas that have the potential to change the very nature of the procurement profession, to ones that got the assembled minds thinking about the profession’s impact outside of the organisation, the response we received was amazing.

Alex Kleiner, General Manager, EMEA at Coupa Software, says that organisations as a whole need to throw off their linear thinking and increase flexibility and fluidity.

This transition will allow organisations to eliminate barriers to collaboration, but also enable procurement to focus more on alternatives to savings, such as usability, people, or even lives saved!

Catch up with all the thought leadership and ours delegates’ Big Ideas from the 2016 Summit at the Procurious Learning Hub.

If you want to find out more about Big Ideas 2016, and what we have planned for 2017, you can visit our dedicated website!

If you like this (and you haven’t done so already) join Procurious for free today, and connect with over 15,500 like-minded procurement professionals from across the world.

Tom Derry believes procurement needs to move away from a traditional cost focus, and create a more strategic brand value for the profession.

At the Big Ideas Summit 2016, we challenged our thought leaders to share their Big Ideas for the future of procurement.

From ideas that have the potential to change the very nature of the procurement profession, to ones that got the assembled minds thinking about the profession’s impact outside of the organisation, the response we received was amazing.

Tom Derry, CEO of the Institute of Supply Management (ISM), believes that it’s time for procurement to have a more strategic brand value, and transition away from a traditional focus on cost, to support the greater dimensions of value for organisations.

As CEOs are becoming more concerned about risk profiles (brand risk; risk of disruption), the brand of procurement is being enhanced by offering value in risk management and mitigation, as well as adding value and managing cost.

Catch up with all the thought leadership and ours delegates’ Big Ideas from the 2016 Summit at the Procurious Learning Hub.

If you want to find out more about Big Ideas 2016, and what we have planned for 2017, you can visit our dedicated website!

If you like this (and you haven’t done so already) join Procurious for free today, and connect with over 15,500 like-minded procurement professionals from across the world.

You could be forgiven for thinking the management of indirect procurement is akin to rocket science. Is it really so complex?

Sourcing and contracting indirect goods and services in categories like I.T., consulting, HR and travel is important to keep the business running.

You could be forgiven for thinking that the procurement of such services is akin to rocket science, especially if you listen to those many external “solution providers” whose income stream may depend on you.

It may be tempting to consider outsourcing some or all of the management of your indirect spend. In many organisations it is often poorly recorded, loosely managed, widely dispersed, and, generally, messy or neglected. But first let’s consider the issues, and how this indirect spend could be managed internally.

Direct and Indirect Procurement

Direct (or core) procurement traditionally focuses mainly on the sourcing of goods, and some allied services, that are used in the manufacturing or production of goods for sale. These items are usually clearly specified, often with a pre-defined supplier base.

Indirect procurement is different. It is essentially the sourcing of services (and maybe some goods) to support day-to-day operations.

The indirect spend may make up around 30 per cent of all third-party spend, but there are significantly more suppliers and the buying community is more decentralised. Add to that, a higher potential for maverick spend and sensitive stakeholders, and there is the added complexity.

What is happening now is that the percentage of indirect spend-under-management is growing in many companies. Difficult areas such as advertising, insurance and consulting fees are slowly being brought into the category structure.

It is often said that indirect procurement is not strategic. However, some high spend categories, such as sponsorship and employee benefits, could definitely qualify.

Key issues in Indirect Procurement

Buying decisions are often dispersed throughout an organisation into diverse and competing business units or locations.

Stakeholders can, and will, resist any changes on which they have not been consulted.

Managing an indirect category such as marketing services or consulting requires assembling the historical data and providing reliable spend information. Often transactions are miscoded – sometimes on purpose – which creates the wrong picture.

Suppliers can only be a resource for continuous improvement if the communication channels are open in both directions.

Strategies for Indirect Procurement

The first step in a category strategy should be to aggregate the spend and understand it and its sub-categories. Next, present this information, in a digestible form, to stakeholders to elicit their input.

It is never too early to talk to stakeholders about the data or the proposed Scope of Work. After the Request for Proposal has been issued, it is too late.

Two of the success criteria in indirect procurement are a robust Scope of Work and a detailed Service Level Agreement with workable measurements. Without these, any contract can fail.

Indirect Procurement as a Career Choice

The requisite technical skills for individual success in procurement have been well-documented. One of the key skills of the future is to be numerate and have analytical ability, but not necessarily be a mathematician.

Managing indirect categories requires a different skill set from that which is needed for working in direct procurement. Behavioural skills, which can also be acquired, come into the spotlight here.

Particularly important is the need to collaborate with stakeholders. An aspiring category manager needs Influencing and listening skills, empathy, and the ability to take the initiative as well as being decisive when the need arises.

Indirect categories (when the tail-end spend is excluded) do not easily lend themselves to automation or the use of the e-procurement tools, such as e-catalogues or vendor management systems.

This creates a dilemma for external service providers who have these tools, but readily admit that there are nuances and emotions at play that may be beyond their control.

The organisational culture and landscape on the indirect side has many nuances that do not exist on the direct side. Procurement executives will therefore need to traverse the waters of indirect spend with unique strategies to ensure success.

Indirect procurement is all about building trust with stakeholders and suppliers to ensure continuity of supply and smooth operations.

Just try to procure the same make and model of smartphone for everyone, or change the catering company without considering end-users.

If you want your business to thrive, sticking with the status quo isn’t enough. Ensuring high performance in procurement is the only way to stay ahead of the competition.

With a volatile economy, the need for superior supply management and increased organisational efficiency is vital. Organisations feel the pressure to contain costs while maximising results.

However, incremental improvement won’t work. For long-term success, a transformation of key processes is required. Supply chain managers must accept nothing less than adopting the methods that can make their organisation best in class.

How Well is Your Company Covering the Basics?

While innovative solutions will be important going forward, the foundation of high performance is mastering the basics. Ensuring contract procurement efficiency based on solid core processes will lead to savings in both time and resources, driving better outcomes.

According to data collected by the Aberdeen Group, 70 per cent of procurement executives cite addressing and streamlining indirect spend processes as a top focus for controlling and reducing costs.

While many procurement executives have found ways to rein in cost inefficiencies in direct spend, they are also finding that tried-and-true techniques for reducing costs aren’t working.

So, how can you ensure high performance in your procurement contracts? The following areas contain some of the most targeted ways to achieve success:

Making Use of Mobile Apps to Expedite Processes

Employing the use of mobile apps can help with contract execution.

Mobile apps allow your employees the ability to use real-time information. This will help managers rapidly adapt to the changing procurement environment around them.

Dole Foods is a prime example of how mobile technology can expedite key business processes. The company created a mobile app to streamline key components of logistics and workflows.

Case Study: Dole Foods

Dole Foods is currently the world’s largest producer of fresh fruits and vegetables as well as high-quality packaged foods. The organisation markets and sells their products in over 90 countries.

However, today’s economic conditions along with changing consumer preferences, rising competition, and new regulatory hurdles caused the company to seek new ways to support continued growth.

Their partnership with SAP for core operations was already proving extremely effective; however, accessing the tracking and management software from laptops and desktops alone was becoming cumbersome.

The solution was a user-friendly mobile app, allowing Dole employees to stay productive while on the go. Now, purchase orders can be addressed and managed on their smartphones and tablets.

The ready-to-use P.O. Approval app is fully integrated with Dole Foods’ on-site SAP system. The result is seamless performance.

Employing Multiple Communication Channels

While face-to-face meetings are ideal, they are not always possible. This is where communication software can be invaluable.

Its cloud-based capacity allows for instant communication, the inclusion of multiple collaborators, and permanent record keeping of all communications.

Internally, your team may want to use Slack. This ensures all relevant parties receive the information in a timely manner. And, when everyone is knowledgeable, the risk of errors and legal concerns are reduced.

Automation: Now is the Time

Companies should consider automating to help accelerate key processes. Automated template management can provide a major time-saving benefit. It deploys unlimited customised office templates to all employees.

A contract management template ensures that all the necessary language and concepts are included in your contracts. You can create boilerplate documents that can be easily personalised for special circumstances.

Seamless Supplier Onboarding

Document management is key to never misplacing a critical item. Create a central repository to store all important compliance and legal documents related to each supplier.

Establishing a contract repository provides organised storage of documents. Furthermore, contracts can be securely shared. Permission settings allow for even more in-house confidentiality.

Ensure High Performance

In today’s economy, high-performance procurement contracting is essential. Accuracy and efficiency can lead to significant time and cost savings. Take your business procurement performance to the next level.

Justin Sadler-Smith believes that procurement must improve its technology utilisation, or risk being left behind by the organisation.

At the Big Ideas Summit 2016, we challenged our thought leaders to share their Big Ideas for the future of procurement.

From ideas that have the potential to change the very nature of the procurement profession, to ones that got the assembled minds thinking about the profession’s impact outside of the organisation, the response we received was amazing.

Justin Sadler-Smith, Worldwide Sales Leader at IBM, believes that, in the past, procurement’s technology utilisation hasn’t been effective or efficient enough for the profession to access its full value.

Justin also believes that too many procurement professionals and leaders believe they still have time to build capability. However, many don’t realise that technology change, such as cognitive technology, is already upon them, and their technology utilisation needs to improve fast in order to keep pace in the marketplace.

Catch up with all the thought leadership and ours delegates’ Big Ideas from the 2016 Summit at the Procurious Learning Hub.

If you want to find out more about Big Ideas 2016, and what we have planned for 2017, you can visit our dedicated website!

If you like this (and you haven’t done so already) join Procurious for free today, and connect with over 15,500 like-minded procurement professionals from across the world.

More than a coincidence, this is a sign of the times as the role of Procurement and its position in organisations rapidly becomes quite a recurring hot topic.

Before going into the specifics of ProcureCon’s report, the challenges that Procurement faces stem almost entirely from the transformation Procurement is going through as a function.

Value vs. Cost reductions

“As businesses emerge from the recent recession into a fragmented supplier ecosystem, a normal approach to creating value through cost saving alone is no longer relevant.”

ProcureCon’s report is not the only one to highlight the current gap between a value-­based Procurement approach and the actual KPIs that most organisations track, specifically:

91 per cent of surveyed organisations have cost savings as a KPI;

76 per cent have cost avoidance as a KPI.

KPIs for value metrics like quality, risk, and cycle times languish respectively in 5th, 8th, and 12th place! Fewer than 50 per cent of companies track these measures.

More troubling: only 30 per cent track Procurement ROI as a KPI. ROI (Return On Investment) or VFM (Value For Money) is actually the main KPI that all organisations should aim for as it synthesises the ratio between value generated and energy or resources employed. Or, in other words, a measure of the effectiveness and efficiency of a Procurement organisation.

Supplier Management Core Procurement Activity

Among the many interesting insights in the report, there are two aspects related to supplier management and stakeholder management that are kind of interesting. They both relate to the qualification of suppliers and are quite revealing.

Procurement still operates too much in a silo

“Procurement typically take the lead when it comes to the qualification of contractors and suppliers during the bid process.”

Decisions regarding sourcing have to be cross-­functional. Not only to ensure that all aspects have been looked at but mostly to ensure adoption of the decisions. Involving other departments in the decision-­making process is critical.

Even better, involving them in the early stage of defining a category’s strategy is vital to define the value that they expect suppliers to deliver. This may not be low prices alone.

Procurement still sees suppliers as trading partners, not business partners

There are also a couple of surprises when it comes to the dimensions Procurement looks at when assessing new potential suppliers. We assume this also reflects the KPIs tracked afterward.

Not surprisingly, financial stability comes first. As a former purchaser, I can say this fits with the practices I have seen on the field. This is not without inherent risk: “conducting a single financial stability check (e.g. D&B check) before engaging a supplier could provide a false sense of assurance.”

More surprisingly, CSR-­related themes like sustainability and safety stand squarely in the middle of the list. Around 50-60 per cent of respondents say they include these factors in their assessments. A notable exception is diversity, which comes last on the list with only 20 per cent of respondents taking this into account.

Issue of Supplier Innovation

But, very surprisingly, competent advice is a criterion that is at the bottom of the list, covered by only 29 per cent of respondents. This is especially surprising considering the focus on the role of Procurement in organisations, and its impact on innovation. The lack of attention on this area is rather troubling.

As we understand it, if organisations do not measure if suppliers could be a source of new ideas and suggestions, it means that they do not expect suppliers to be able to participate in their innovation process. This quite a self­-centred view of innovation!

In conclusion, there seems to be a consensus within the Procurement community that Procurement is not in the place it deserves to be, and that, in the future, its importance will grow. For example, ProcureCon’s report says that 62 per cent of respondents to their survey estimate that Procurement will move towards making board-level decisions in the next 3 years.

But, as far as their report and many others show, there is still a gap in capabilities and delivery that needs to be bridged before we get there.

Ask the question, “What are the challenges procurement faces?” and you’ll get the same responses time and again. So how do we overcome the key challenges and move on?

We’re looking back at some of Procurious’ most popular content from the past 12 months. First up, we revisit an article on the 4 challenges procurement faces, and how to overcome them.

Why? Well, the nature of these challenges never seems to change, so by shining a spotlight on them again, we aim to start a conversation on how to finally put these challenges to rest!

Challenges Procurement Faces

Results from a newly published study shine a light on an assortment of internal challenges facing the procurement function, as well as its changing role as we enter an uncertain future.

Xchanging has issued the first results from its 2015 Global Procurement Study of more than 800 procurement decision makers.

These first set of results look at internal challenges and the new role of procurement, covering misaligned KPIs, lack of internal engagement, capacity issues and skills gaps.

Challenge #1: Misaligned KPIs

Despite the now wide ranging responsibilities of procurement decision makers, 47 per cent name ‘cost savings realised’ as their number one KPI. The top four KPIs listed are all cost related. CSR/Sustainability impact, by comparison, is ranked as the least important at just 1 per cent.

Chirag Shah, Executive Director, Xchanging Procurement comments:“These results strongly indicate that there is a problem with the current KPI structure. Procurement teams are responsible for many business critical functions. From risk management to sustainability impact, procurement is engaged in activities that far surpass its cost-cutter legacy.

“The metrics against which organisations track procurement’s performance do not line up with what procurement actually delivers.”

Challenge #2:Lack of Internal Engagement

63 per cent of procurement decision makers globally identify ‘internal stakeholder engagement’ as a challenge, with 14 per cent claiming it is as an extreme challenge.

Shah explains: “Procurement’s strategic capability isn’t being understood and because of that, it isn’t appropriately valued. Not only is this causing problems for procurement performance, it is also restricting business success. By not engaging with the procurement team and fully understanding what it can deliver as a strategic partner, companies are limiting their potential for growth.”

CPOs clearly feel more internally valued than procurement middle management. 60 per cent of CPOs feel that procurement is a C-level priority in their organisations, compared to 37 per cent of procurement middle managers.

Shah makes a number of recommendations based on the findings: “To improve internal engagement, and properly communicate the value of procurement, procurement departments need to consider tactics such as introducing governance boards, using score cards to track deliverables, leveraging analytics and reporting tools to demonstrate results and even re-labelling team members with non-cost centric job titles that relate to their roles, for example ‘Risk Manager’ or ‘International Consultant’”.

Challenge #3: Capacity Issues

According to Xchanging’s numbers, 80 per cent of procurement decision makers identify ‘procurement team time pressures’ as a challenge, and 20 per cent as a major challenge. This implies that the majority of procurement departments are facing major capacity issues.

Surprisingly, in comparison, ‘talent shortage’ is considered an operational challenge by far fewer respondents, with 59 per cent citing it as a challenge, and only 12 per cent as a major challenge.

The number citing talent shortage as a concern drops to less than half (40 per cent) when asked if it’s a problem for the industry as a whole.

Challenge #4: Skills Gap

The skills considered most important for procurement professionals are ‘relationship management’ (88 per cent consider important, 59 per cent very important) and ‘negotiation skills’ (88 per cent and 58 per cent).

Significantly, these are also the areas where procurement decision makers identify the greatest gaps in skill set provision; around a quarter cite ‘relationship management’ (26 per cent) and ‘negotiation skills’ (23 per cent) as areas with the greatest gap in skill set provision. 23 per cent also name ‘project management’.

Want to read more about the challenges procurement faces? You can download the full report here.